Week of March 4, 2016

Every baseball fan knows and loves the crack of the bat. Even when an opponent does it to your team, when you hear that pure sound of a ball crushed by the sweet spot of the bat, you know you’ve witnessed something pretty amazing.

So, why, exactly, does the sweet spot create that crack, while a ball off the end or the handle creates completely different noises? SCIENCE is here to help. -TOB

PAL: “Watching baseball is an exercise in craving that sound as a sort of near-Pavlovian stimuli. Our brain is constantly receiving hundreds of messages from our sensory system, and our sense of sound is a big part of filling in the gaps of what we see.” What a great article. Applying science, psychology, and even neurology to a feeling so absolutely perfect only adds to my appreciation for one of my favorite sounds. That and my buddy Matt Scanlan just made me a wooden fungo bat – he friggin’ made it. I mean, look at that beauty in the photo up top. Hot damn! I’ve been looking forward to hitting fungos this Saturday morning for the last 24 hours.

Fun With MLB Photo Day

This made me legitimately LOL a number of times. This week MLB had “Photo” day, where they take headshots (and more) of every player and coach at Spring Training. Grant Brisbee went through over 5,000 of this year’s photos and noticed that most of the photos fall into one of eleven categories. In this article, Grant lays out the eleven categories, including “Let Me Show You a Baseball”, “Fake Hitting a Home Run”, and my favorite – “Coach Swallowing a Bug:

PAL: TOB, you overlooked the best category: The Class Photo. Who knows? Perhaps someone from 1-2-3 Sports! has a series of senior class pictures with a lot of hair gel, wearing a suit from Jos. A Bank, and pointing a baseball bat at the camera. Baseball players are such doofuses.

Do They Panic? Do They Flinch? NOPE.

I wanted to share these two stories on Steph Curry and the Warriors last week, but life got in the way and I didn’t have time to write them up. Lucky me. Because on Saturday night Steph and the Warriors went bananas – trailing the Thunder the entire game, only to force overtime after a crazy turnover, and then winning in OT on a 32-ish foot bomb by Curry. If you didn’t see it, crawl out from that rock you’re under because here it is:

That, by the way, tied the NBA record for 3-pointers in a game, at 12 (including 3 in OT). During the game, Curry also broke his own record for 3-pointers in a season, set last year. And there are two months left in the season! He’s incredible.

Anyhow, the first story is an ode to Curry by Bethlehem Shoals, one of the best basketball writers around, and how Steph’s supreme confidence allows him to do the previously inconceivable things that he routinely does. The second is a look at whether the Warriors should sacrifice their depth for a chance to sign Kevin Durant this summer, which to me is a tough call. The Warriors bench is so good that when the bench comes in during the 2nd quarter, they always extend the lead. Does Kevin Durant give enough to the starting unit to make up for what they’d lose in trying to get him? The Warriors would likely need to lose Barnes, Bogut, and Livingston, if not a little more. That’s a hefty price to pay. On the other hand…Curry and Durant together would be terrifying. It’s one of those nice problems to have, but also a problem I am glad I would not have to make the call on. -TOB

PAL: It is absolutely nuts that a story about a team coming off of a championship, in the home stretch of a 70+ win season considering breaking up that team is…well, not necessarily ludicrous. That said, under no circumstances would I bring in KD and get rid of Barnes, Bogut, and Livingston to free up space for KD for 3 reasons:

Ah…they are going to win 70+ games, and this team already holds the title.

Name 1 team you enjoyed after they added a top 10 player to a team that already has/had a top 10 player (TOB loved Miami with LeBron and Wade…gross).

Steph – you have your nucleus with Draymond and Klay. This Warriors team can win multiple championships without KD. The league is better when the alphas are leading their own crew. Also, that would be a weak move on KD’s part.

Video of the Week

Clippers owner, and former Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer with an absolutely ridiculous, emasculating trampoline dunk. My favorite part, other than his hilarious face, is how he very nearly misses the trampoline.